MS 13 gang members indicted on racketeering, drug charges (UPDATED)

The feds just announced that five alleged members or associates of the Mara Salva Trucha (MS-13) street gang have been indicted on racketeering, drug trafficking and firearms violations as part of a case led by Immigration and Customs Enforcement-Homeland Security Investigations.

(updated:) The fearsome gang, which was previously known for members having extreme amounts of tattoos on their bodies and faces, was started by El Salvadorans.

Rodney Zaid Mejia, Pedro Melendez and Hector Villarreal, all 20 years old and from Houston, are to be brought before a federal magistrate Thursday afternoon, according to a news release.

Two others, Hector Abarca,21, and Johnnie Sanchez, 31, are already jailed on state charges and due to make their initial appearances in the near future.

The arrests were quietly carried out Wednesday by ICE, along with the Drug Enforcement Administration, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, as well as the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and Houston Police Department.

The news release states that Mejia, Abarca and Melendez are accused of engaging in racketeering by attempting to murder someone in order to gain entry or climb the ranks of the gang. Sanchez and Villarreal are accused of trafficking narcotics.

What will happen is that they will get federal pen terms, perhaps lengthy. What will happen there is that they will simply operate in the MS-13 from prison, where that gang originated.

What should happen is that a bounty be placed on anyone sporting their tattoo, or seen in the presence of anyone known to be a member of the gang. No, this will never happen. But in a more pragmatic world it would.

A toddler’s shooting death, linked to a violent Central American gang that could be linked to as many as nine area killings, is turning the attention of a national task force Houston’s way.

Miguel Angel Castro, a 19-year-old El Salvador native, is charged with capital murder in the April 12 death of Aiden Naquin, who would have been 2 in August.

Castro is accused of firing on a car driven by the boy’s father as it pulled into the Huffman trailer park in the 2700 block of Third where the family lives. One of the bullets struck the toddler in the head.

Castro indelibly marked his body with tattoos indicating he is a member of the Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, gang, said detectives with the Harris County Sheriff’s Department. Mara Salvatrucha, which was started by Salvadoran refugees in the Los Angeles area in the early 1980s and now reaches into 31 other states, has been the target of a federal crackdown that last month swept six U.S. cities, netting the arrests of 103 gang members.

“The biggest groupings have been in L.A., New York and northern Virginia, but the cliques seem to be growing quickly now in Providence, Rhode Island; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Houston,” said Bob Clifford, who heads the MS-13 National Task Force that formed in January.

He said the task force is keenly aware of the latest killing in Houston. Houston police want to question other suspects, who they say were with Castro during a recent standoff, about possible connections to nine other homicides.

“We are becoming increasingly involved in Houston on this and other cases. When we look at Houston, we will be looking for ties that may connect to other parts of the U.S.,” he said. “This gang’s propensity for vicious violence, its rapid spread and ties to violent Central American cliques have made it the highest priority of the FBI’s gang investigations.”

He pointed to another recent connection to the MS-13 gang in Texas that disturbed federal investigators.

On Feb. 10, an alleged MS-13 gang member was arrested in McAllen trying to illegally cross an immigration checkpoint, he said.

“This same individual is a suspect in the killing of 28 men, women and children and wounding of 14 others on a bus that was ambushed in December in Honduras,” he said.

The attack was in response to a government crackdown there on the MS-13 gang.

Officials believe the gang is loosely organized now, but they are concerned the underculture may be developing a more national structure.

“This gang has strong, ominous connections to El Salvador, Honduras and Mexico, where the gang has more rigid organizational structures like the mafia has had,” he said.

The first part of the gang’s name, Mara, can be traced to a Central American slang term for “street gang,” taken from a species of an ant that devours tropical forests. “Salva” is an abbreviation for El Salvador, and “trucha” is a slang word for “fear us,’ ” Clifford said. The 13 refers to ‘m,’ the 13th letter in the alphabet.

The ’13′ was added after MS-13 joined forces with the Mexican Mafia to provide protection for members sent to prison.

Although MS-13′s presence in Houston was known before Castro’s arrest, the gang had not yet brought national attention to itself as it has in the Washington, D.C., area, where its members have been implicated in two machete attacks since May.

In one of the cases, the body of a woman who gave information to authorities about her former gang associates was found repeatedly stabbed and her head nearly decapitated on the banks of the Shenandoah River.

“The gang’s preferred method to kill is beheadings,” said Clifford, stressing the brutality of the group.

The burial Monday of the 20-month-old boy from Huffman and the possibility that his two older sisters could have been killed along with their father made that brutality very real for his family.

Aiden’s parents cried, hugged and kissed him as he lay surrounded by teddy bears in a tiny blue casket before his burial in Humble.
From 2005 Houston Chronicle
Published 05:30 a.m., Tuesday, April 19, 2005
7 years later still a serious problem.

What will happen is that they will get federal pen terms, perhaps lengthy. What will happen there is that they will simply operate in the MS-13 from prison, where that gang originated.

What should happen is that a bounty be placed on anyone sporting their tattoo, or seen in the presence of anyone known to be a member of the gang. No, this will never happen. But in a more pragmatic world it would.

Supreme Court hears the oral arguments on the illegal immigration enforcement case, Arizona vs. Obama, next Tuesday. About to get reform of lax enforcement of our immigration laws, via state and locals governments…

Drugs are always intertwined with other things – murder, violence, theft, burglary. Legalizing drugs won’t end the other things. It’s better to get someone on drugs, than to risk (more) lives and loss.

According to a recent article in the Chron, these vermin are being trained by the Zeta’s in Mexico, and that is what they are bringing to Houston. As soon as one of them are identified as MS-13, they need to be rounded up and jailed until they can be gotten rid of permanently.

MS 13 is as dangerous and violent as a gang can be. Pray you don’t ever come across one while they are dealing drugs. ICE needs to target these fools and send them as far away from the USA as they can get them.

Our lawmaners need to make it a capital crime to be members of gangs such as MS13. There’s not too much difference for them to be on the inside as on the outside. A cell in soilitary up until the day you are put down would be one difference

No, the article is correct. MS-13 was started by El Salvadorans, but it didn’t say they formed in El Salvador. They did originally form in LA by El Salvadoran refugees. The article just didn’t mention LA.

Great work to our Fed. agencies! Now go out and pick up the 10,000 other low life gang bangers in Houston. Guess if Houston was not the number one sanctuary city in the nation, we’d have less of these losers on our streets.
Can you hear me Mayor Parker? Signed: IVotedSoICanComplain.

Mexico-born gang members are all over Houston, HPD won’t even begin to admit how bad things are now and how much crime they bring along into our city. Remember the shootout a few months ago with cartels and an informant? They tried to HUSH that down quick.

Good question. Authorities have not yet said. They do say that the men are “from Houston,” however the involvement of Immigration and Customs Enforcement seems to indicate there might be more to that aspect of the story. When we get more on that, we’ll share it.